Whether touring the globe with a groundbreaking extravaganza or launching an out-of-this-world fragrance, Lady Gaga is meeting the future on her own wildly inventive terms.

It’s well past midnight at the Park Hyatt in Tokyo, the sleek skyscraper hotel made famous by the film Lost in Translation, and at this hour, it seems there are more staff than guests. I’m just coming back from a night out when suddenly there’s a commotion in the formal, hush-hush lobby. A young, handsome guy appears and begins signaling to someone around the corner whom I cannot see. Then he says, in a loud whisper, “The coast is clear!” At that, a woman pushing a wheelchair comes around the corner and scurries across the lobby to the elevator. The person in the wheelchair is listing to the side, as if drunk, and is covered by a shroud, or what appears to be an oversize Hermès scarf. (Could be Versace. Hard to say. They are moving very quickly.) And then—whoosh—just like that, all three sweep into an open elevator and are whisked up, up, and away.

Had to be Gaga. She’s staying here for a three-night stand with the Born This Way Ball at the Saitama Super Arena. When I finally meet up with her in a suite at the hotel a few days later, it’s the first thing I bring up. Gaga is in exaggerated-tacky mode, wearing a plasticky shift that she bought in Harajuku earlier today. It is the color of a trash bag and is quilted, with a big Chanel logo across the chest; but it is so obviously fake that it asks you to laugh and not worry about its provenance. She is also wearing so much “gold” jewelry—bangles and necklaces and giant hoop earrings—that even the tiniest of movements creates a symphony of jingle-­jangle. Her hair (or wig) is dyed two shades—blonde and a coppery color she calls “fox”—and has been swept up into a high ponytail on the right side of her head. (“I love my side pony,” she says. “It instantly makes me feel like I am four and three-quarters.”) When I get to the part about the seemingly incapacitated woman covered by a giant, chic scarf being wheeled through the lobby, she narrows her eyes and says, breathlessly, “Fabulous.” Then she abruptly shakes her head: Nope. Sorry to disappoint. Wasn’t me.

“Yes, it could have . . .” she says as she sits up straight, perhaps recognizing an opportunity to sow a bit of mischief. “I should just say, ‘Yes, it was me.’ ”

That I just assumed it was Gaga says an awful lot about how deeply her brand of high jinks has seeped into our subconscious. The fashiony shroud . . . the tragicomic wheelchair . . . the public “drunkenness”—all plays from the Lady’s handbook. And the fact that I still don’t know whether it was Gaga or not is exactly the point. She doesn’t care whether it’s “true” or “false,” as there is more frisson—more zest, more fun—in the wondering.

Gaga has always had a peculiar relationship with the truth. She has said many times onstage, “I hate the truth so much that I would prefer a giant dose of bullshit any day.” (Even the veracity of that statement is in question.) This playful slipperiness is one of the many reasons the people of Japan have taken such a shine to her. When she performs here, many of her exceptionally devoted Japanese fans rise to the occasion by wearing magnificent contraptions of their own. Over the next week, some of them will camp outside the hotel for hours, days, sometimes in the pouring rain, waiting to see Mother Monster’s mini-motorcade come and go. Occasionally, she will ask her driver to stop, the van’s door will slide open, and the eerily ruly mob will gently surge forward, reach for her, sob, but otherwise remain almost entirely silent. As Lady Gaga herself puts it, “I think some of it has to do with the obsession with fantasy. The blurring of fantasy and reality is something that the Japanese herald in their life, in their day-to-day commercialism. In a way, I think I sort of just fit right in over here.”

Come to think of it, there is something Japanese about the DNA of the entire Gaga enterprise. The obsession with monsters; the one-part scary, one-part cute aspect to the Lady herself (think Godzilla, think Mothra); the powdered-geisha vibe; the Murakami-like magical realism. She is even the subject of a Nobuyoshi Araki exhibit—large-format black-and-white photos of her tied up and naked—that is being mounted in a pop-up gallery in a giant shopping mall not far from our hotel: She is the only non-Japanese woman he has photographed for his scandalous bondage series. As one Japanese record executive tells me, “Everyone loves her here, even grandmothers who have never heard her music.” Gaga was one of the first to donate more than $1 million for relief after the earthquake and tsunami, and she has been to the country many times, before and since that terrible tragedy. In some ways, she is like an adopted national hero, the ultimate Japanese mascot—a cartoonish human plush toy.

There’s also the fact that the spirit of the Club Kid, that early-nineties New York City invention (a moment that clearly left a mark on LG), has never died in Tokyo. Young people in this city routinely dress as if they are heading to a costume ball—or as if they are five years old. In fact, six such women—Miki, Mio, Lisa, Junko, Meg, and Kaoru—come backstage to say hello after Gaga’s show one night, which happens to fall on Mother’s Day. She is dressed in a hooded, full-length, loose-fitting silky robe covered in a Gothy pattern of roses and tiny skeletons, which was designed by Donatella Versace (as were many of the costumes for the tour).

“I miiiiisssss yoooooou,” says Gaga in that sleepy whine of hers. A girly hugfest ensues. Calling them by their first names, Gaga asks about their lives. They tell her that they all traveled to New York City together and went to her parents’ restaurant, Joanne. “Did you meet my mom?” she says. Someone whips out a cell phone and hands it to Gaga. She turns to show me the picture: “Look how cute they are. They all have Little Monster jackets on.” It is hard to imagine any other star of this magnitude being so intimate with her fans. Later Gaga will tell me, “I love them. I’ve seen them every single year when I come to Tokyo and they travel all around the world to come see me. They are just so special and wonderful and sweet.”

Hovering nearby filming all of this is the photographer Terry Richardson, who followed Gaga during the Monster Ball for last fall’s photo book Lady Gaga x Terry Richardson and is now back, capturing her every move for what may become a documentary or, one hopes, something weirder. As Richardson’s camera is rolling, the girls announce that they have rehearsed a little show. What follows is simply beyond description, but suffice it to say that with its stilted dialogue peppered with self-consciously naughty language, it is one of the most awkwardly poignant moments I have ever witnessed. As the skit comes to an end, Miki announces that they have an “award” for Lady Gaga. She rolls out a five-foot-long piece of red fabric on the floor as one of the other girls sets an elaborate box at one end. “Is this the red carpet?” asks Gaga, beginning to laugh. “Yes!” they say, in unison. She takes two tiny steps on it, gets down on her knees, and opens the box. Encased in glass is a replica of the now-familiar Lady Gaga “paw”—a clawed hand that looks like it is trying to dig its way out of a shallow grave, but covered in jewels. Gaga sucks in a breath. “I love it!” she says. “Did you have this made?”

“We made it.”

“You made this?” she says. “I’m going to take care of it forever.” She seems almost embarrassed by the extravagance of the gesture. “You know, girls,” she says a moment later. “You don’t have to bring me any presents. I am always just happy to see you. Take care of each other, OK?” (Later, I exchange e-mails with Miki: “We work so hard n save money to go to her show n to meet her b/c she made our life sparkling!”)

Lady Gaga is best experienced live. Her music, her voice, her shtick, her costumes: all better live. As Marla Weinhoff, who art-directed the sets for Gaga’s new show, says to me, “I mean, it’s a Judy or a Barbra. I’ve never seen her miss her mark. I’ve never seen her sing a bad note. I have seen the technology fail her, but she has never let us down.” But it’s not just her showmanship. It’s the presentation of her ideas on the stage—clever, often brilliant, occasionally sublime—that puts Gaga in a category of her own.

At the end of 2010, I watched Lady Gaga perform four sold-out arena shows in Europe for a piece for this magazine, and while Gaga herself was mesmerizing, the staging was a little hokey—the too-literal monster dominating the set, the allusions to The Wizard of Oz. That tour had started out in relatively small venues, but in the middle of it, she gained millions of new fans, and the Monster Ball had to be arena-sized on the fly. In other words, she was not entirely in control.

The Born This Way Ball, however, is her dream tour, conceived by her from start to finish as a preposterously extravagant spectacle designed for massive arenas all over the world. (After wending its way through Asia and Australia, the tour will head to Europe, arriving in the States early next year.) When I tell her that this show has a kind of spooky chic to it, that it feels more grown-up, she lets out a yelp. “Yes, it was intentional for this show to be more sophisticated and more elegant—a little cleaner. Sometimes I think that there’s a fine line between impressionistic and messy. So we tried to make this more French Impressionistic and less like a child’s finger painting.” She laughs. “I really wanted to break the mold of what modern touring is right now. The most important thing to me was that there be no video screens. What if we just really simplified all of that so that you just have to watch me and the dancers the whole time?”

The set itself is what she calls a “fortress, or a kingdom,” and when Gaga suddenly appears at the top of it, in a turret, dancing 50 feet above the audience, the proceedings take on an air of dread and danger: Tosca on steroids. (The fact that she suffered a concussion a few weeks later only points out how real that danger is.) “No matter how much you rehearse on that stage, once you add 30,000 screaming people with flashing cameras into the equation, it’s pretty intense.”

I attended their eighth performance—and Gaga had stayed up the whole night prior rethinking several elements. “I get these cyclical rushes of creativity that are really exciting,” she says. “The day you saw the show, I’d actually changed a lot of things. We had to create new outfits; the Haus of Gaga was sewing all day long—just taking something that’s already great and making it really great.”

There are some truly disturbing and thrilling moments—like when Gaga floats across the stage in a long white dress wearing a helmet that makes her look like a fabulous alien bug; or when Gaga rolls out into the arena as a human motorcycle, her arms and head draped across the handlebars; or when she and her troupe of dancers do a lengthy homage to Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” to the Gaga song “Scheiße,”which opens with the line “I don’t speak German, but I can if you like.” (Scheiße means “bullshit” in German.) But oddly enough, the set piece in the show that startled and moved me the most was based on the meat dress. When the number first began, I recoiled: Why bring it back? But Gaga took the meat-dress concept, expanded on it, set the whole idea to her Edith Piaf–esque song about immigration, “Americano,” and something amazing happened.

Nothing on the stage is made of actual meat, mind you, but it all looks as if it is from afar. And her strapless little bell-skirt meat dress, it must be said, is adorable. When I tell her how cute she looked in it, she nearly jumps out of her seat. “That was precisely the conversation we had when we made it: Let’s take the grotesqueness out of it and make it tailored and sweet.” But there is much more going on: Gaga entering stage right, hanging from a meat hook next to huge slabs of beef; male dancers dressed as border agents; female dancers in meat bikinis; a giant meat grinder, quilted and with gold accents, as if it were made by Chanel, that Gaga gets fed into at the end.

“We were talking about putting the show together,” she tells me, “And I said, OK, what if I was someone’s grandma and I was going to a concert tonight. How would I know that it was a Gaga show? And we all just sort of looked at each other and said, ‘The meat dress.’ We talked a lot about the original intention, which was to create an outfit that is indicative of the fact that underneath all of our different skin colors and religions and beliefs, we are all made of flesh and bone. And then this instant image came to my mind, which was from the late seventies, of the woman being put into a meat grinder on the cover of Hustler magazine, which really terrified me when I was a child. So I tried to spin all that into a space of humor and politics and sexuality onstage.”

Trust me: It works. A famous folksinger once told me, “Rock ’n’ roll is a lot of things, but it’s rarely ever funny. It takes itself very seriously.” If that is the case, then Lady Gaga is performing one of the great magic tricks of the twenty-first century: She’s making rock ’n’ roll hilarious. And it’s not B-52s funny. It’s Marina Abramovi´c funny. You are laughing while you are being awed. When I tell her this, she says, “What’s wonderful is that when the show’s over and I meet fourteen-year-olds backstage and I say, ‘What was your favorite part?’ they go, ‘The meat dreeeesssss!!!!’ ” She giggles. “So it serves two purposes: You had a transcendent moment, and my fourteen-year-old fans just really like the meat dress.”

After a show one night, I watch as Gaga spontaneously joins the jazz-pop trio performing at the New York Bar at the top of the Park Hyatt. Wearing a black, shiny custom Atelier Versace dress, thigh-high custom Giorgio Armani boots, and fingerless black leather gloves, she perches on a stool between the piano and the bass and growls and scats her way through a rollicking version of the 1950s standard “Orange Colored Sky.” In the middle of the song, a tipsy American tourist in the audience says, way too loudly, “I love her now! I never really liked her before now!”

Gaga’s musical abilities are fairly well documented at this point, but there are still great swaths of people who can’t see past the freaky costumes, dismissing her as a lightweight or a carnival sideshow—somehow not the genuine article. When I bring up this gentleman’s revelation (it was captured on YouTube), Lady Gaga surprises me with her equanimity. “Well, in his defense . . . ” she laughs. “My records don’t always lend themselves to me enchanting you with my vocal stylings or my jazz chops. So you can’t be upset about people not knowing about things that you don’t make available to them.” Gaga’s songs sound, for the most part, like party music designed for the dance floor. “I don’t really make records for people to listen and go, ‘Wow, she’s a genius.’ I’d really like for you to order another drink, maybe kiss the person who you came with that evening, or rediscover something about your past that makes you feel more brave.”

“Born This Way,” the single, was the fastest-selling single in iTunes history, but Born This Way, the album, despite getting enthusiastically mixed reviews, was considered something of a disappointment. When I ask Gaga if she was pleased with its reception, she says, with a somewhat forced blasé air, “Sure. I really couldn’t ask for anything more. The tour is sold out. We sold eight million records.” And then she says, “Everything is great,” which makes me think that there must have been some days when everything was not great.

Some of the letdown probably had to do with the fact that Born This Way happened to come out the same season as Adele’s juggernaut, 21, which shot to number one, won every award on planet Earth, and refuses to cede its spot at the top of the charts. The freak-of-nature success of that album has led to all manner of comparison: Adele, not Gaga, is the voice of their generation; acoustic music, soul music, real music—not Gaga’s wall of electronic sound—is what people yearn to hear.

Despite the fact that electronic music has, at long last, ascended into the mainstream, it’s still not always taken seriously. When I bring this up, Gaga says, “Well, I think we both know that acoustic music isn’t better than electronic music. Electronic music requires a tremendous amount of technical expertise—really knowing the mathematics and beauty of music. At the risk of sounding like a snob, if you don’t really understand how to make electronic music, it might be much easier for you to write it off as low-brow.”

But Lady Gaga gets to have it both ways. Adele appeals to multiple generations, partly because she admires the sound of an earlier era, music that tugs at the heartstrings of people who still buy CDs. Gaga, on the other hand, courts controversy, not easy listeners. She’s like a one-woman generation gap, an iconoclast who agitates for social and political change (witness her Born This Way Foundation). At the same time, she is a nimble-enough musician that she can reorchestrate her songs and sing them live in every style imaginable, as she did last year when she rewrote her song “Yoü and I” for Bill and Hillary at the president’s sixty-fifth-birthday celebration at the Hollywood Bowl.

She is also nimble enough, technologically speaking, to pivot from being one of the most “liked” people on Facebook—and the undisputed Queen of Twitter (with more than 27 million followers)—to being the first celebrity to create her very own social network, littlemonsters.com, which debuted in mid-July. (Why should Zuckerberg get all the traffic?) Short of asking fans to perform in her stead, it’s the next logical step for an artist who claims she “will continue to become whatever it is they would like for me to be.”

“I’m not the beginning anymore.” she says. “I don’t really see myself anymore as the center. They’re the center. I’m the atmosphere around it.” She is also careful not to view her fans around the world as one undifferentiated mass. “I try to find ways to get to know the fan bases individually and then bring them together through the music. That’s the challenge.”

Indeed, her biggest worry while we are in Tokyo is her upcoming performance in Indonesia. She had scheduled her show there to take place in the 52,000-seat Bung Karno Stadium, the biggest venue in Jakarta (which was one of the fastest-selling dates on the tour). “Everyone’s telling me we may not be able to go, and that’s making me very upset. Because for me, that’s precisely why we need to go: because there are extremist groups there that are violent, and that’s where the message of Born This Way is most needed. It has nothing to do with the way that I dress or how I sound; it has everything to do with the power of the message and the mobilization of youth.” You have them worried, I say. “Yes, as if I’m coming in with my homosexual laser-beam gun and making everybody gay.” (The show was ultimately canceled after threats of violence.)

When it comes to criticism and controversy, you seem tougher than most chicks, I say.

“I am tougher than most chicks. I would say that I am tougher than most people. I am rarely truly shaken to my core in an ego-driven way. Of course things can catch me off guard, but for the most part I’m pretty focused on the work, and that sort of saves me from all the noise.” She looks down for a moment and fiddles with her bracelets. “It’s easy when you become successful to feel that shallow pool of water pulling you closer and closer. So you just have to remind yourself: That’s not me, remember? And it only takes a second.”

Most people who spend time in Gaga’s orbit come away from the experience in a state of stunned amazement. As Terry Richardson puts it, “The girl just knows how things go together, what works. Everybody invited into that energy feels it—it just bubbles, it moves.”

This is exactly what I felt when I followed her for a week in 2010. But I also came away feeling something else: concern. She was manic at times, occasionally verging on unhinged, and she seemed exhausted, to the point where she fell asleep in the middle of one of our talks. How is she going to keep this up? How can an artist reinvent herself so elaborately every day and not get lost?

But now, in Tokyo, Gaga seems not only calmer and more focused but also more mature. Perhaps she’s fully embraced the fact that she’s in control of an enterprise with a lot of moving parts, including more than 100 people and a multimillion-dollar stage set that travels the world in three 747s. One night backstage I see her get into a heated conversation with her choreographer, Richy Jackson, about moving the band to the top of the castle. Richy disagrees with her. “It’s just hard for the band,” he says. “But I will dance around them up there,” says Gaga. “I am only up there twice.” Long pause. “Richy, just trust me.” He lets out a big sigh and says, “Ohhhhh-kay. We’ll move them.” As Jackson walks away, Gaga says, “Love you!”

With the Haus of Gaga, she’s surrounded herself with people she loves and admires. “The Haus has become this intensely wonderful group of friends of mine who are just so gifted,” she says. “And when you watch your friends become even greater at what they do, you just feel proud. Because, look, I’m not the only thing they’re ever going to work on. I’m just sort of the vehicle right now for all of their creativity.”

Marla Weinhoff, who worked with Richard Avedon for many years and first met Gaga when she was hired to do the production design for the “Born This Way” video, is now the art director of the Haus of Gaga. “My cynical friends in fashion don’t believe me when I tell them that all of the ideas come from her, but it’s true. It all comes from her head, her dreams. Avedon was the first photographer I ever worked with, and I felt so inspired creating these images that I knew would last forever. The process was unbelievable. And I feel like I really have that with her and her team.” But, she adds, “You can’t come with a huge ego. If you can somehow feel her world and feel what she’s trying to say and do, then it’s amazing.”

This, not surprisingly, is exactly what happened with the folks at Coty, the perfume company that partnered with Gaga to develop Fame, her first fragrance; after some resistance, they fell under Gaga’s spell. “She only wants to have a very high-end creative collaboration with people she trusts,” says Yael Tuil, the vice president of global marketing at Coty, “so we have been working with Nick Knight, who designed the bottle, and Steven Klein on the campaign.”

At the very first meeting, Gaga told the Coty executives that she had an idea. She wanted the fragrance in the bottle to be black but, when sprayed, to become clear. “I was pregnant at that time,” says Tuil, who speaks in a thick French accent. “I started to sweat on my forehead. I said, ‘My God! That’s impossible! How can we do that?’ ” But Gaga insisted: She would not sign a contract unless they could figure it out. So Coty set the R&D scientists to work, and they eventually came out of the lab with a liquid that did exactly that. Voilà! Now Coty has a patent pending for this opaque-to-clear technology. “She was really behind the most important innovation in the fragrance industry in the last 20 years,” says Tuil. “She is really pushing boundaries.”

In Tokyo, I tell Lady Gaga that I was skeptical at first of her having a celebrity fragrance. But after seeing the egg-shaped bottle (inspired by the sculptor Constantin Brancusi) with the black “juice” sloshing around inside of it, the outrageous ad campaign, I came around. When I almost apologize to Gaga for doubting her, she says, “No! I think it’s good that you doubted me. It’s a fragrance! You have to raise an eyebrow. I appreciate that. I raised an eyebrow. I didn’t really want to do it at first. But I wanted to create a fragrance that somebody who makes fragrances says, ‘Well, how did they do that?’ And of course, once it smelled so good everyone said, ‘Can’t we just make it clear so we don’t have to explain to people that it won’t get on your clothes?’ And I said, No. The fragrance is called Fame; it must be black. It must smell enticing. You must want to lick and touch and feel it, but the look of it must terrify you.”

Gaga eventually came to view the entire project, but especially the ad campaign, as a kind of punk-rock experiment: “We thought, Let’s just make the most epic fragrance campaign of all time and let’s not care at all about whether they can even print it or show it on TV. Let’s just do everything we ever dreamed of. We basically did this purely for the pleasure of working together. We were just sort of sitting in the corner going, ‘I can’t believe they are letting us do this!’ ”

One evening, we pile into a couple of vans and drive in the pouring rain for nearly an hour to Sumida, an industrial neighborhood at the watery edges of Tokyo, to attend a sort of ceremonial opening of the Tokyo Skytree, a broadcast tower with a restaurant and observation deck at the top—the tallest tower in the world. Before leaving the hotel, Gaga is torn about what to wear. “Should I change?” she says to no one in particular, and I can feel her team holding their breath. (Gaga changing outfits, as one can imagine, is akin to launching the space shuttle.) Yes, it is decided. She will change. She slips into her hotel suite and, a very long while later, reappears wearing a plastic star in her hair and the craziest little dress in Japan. It is made out of hundreds of tiny plastic mirrors that have been sewn together into origami-like boxes. “It was just lying in front of my door one morning,” she tells me, “with no note, no name. I have no idea where it came from.” She has decided to take it for a spin, knowing that it will be photographed by every news outlet in the country, in the hope that the designer will come forward.

As we pull out of the underground garage, we stop to say hello to the couple dozen soaking-wet Japanese kids who are waiting, as always, to catch a glimpse of her. I wonder out loud about the reality of living with so much fame. “It’s definitely much more difficult for me to go take a walk,” she says. “I can’t really do those sorts of things anymore. Yesterday, I went out in Harajuku and bought some $10 bustiers and had an ice-cream cone. So I got to do normal New York–girl stuff for a moment in Tokyo.” Did you go unbothered? “No,” she says. “There were a thousand people following me down the street. But I love all those people, so it’s OK.”

Can she ever enjoy a private moment outside? “I’m a complete free spirit, so, even though you don’t see it, I still find time to have sex at night on the beach when no one’s around. Or roll into a bar and get fucked up and dance with my top off. It’s just that no one ever sees that, because I have great, real friends who never let me do it when I would get caught. Or, I shouldn’t say that. I don’t worry about people seeing any of those things; it’s just that I’m less inclined to do them if there’s tons of people around. I like to have private moments, but in public! Where I can feel a little irresponsible and act like I am nineteen.”

This seems like a fine time to inquire about her love life. Lady Gaga has finally moved on from her on-again, off-again relationship with Luc Carl. Lately, she has been photographed looking smitten with the hunky Vampire Diaries actor Taylor Kinney. “I’m just having a really good time performing, making music, flying around the world to see so-and-so. . . . ” She shoots me a sly, knowing smile. “Look, I’m 26, and I want to make records and party and screw around and wear fake Chanel and do what every other 26-year-old girl wants to do. I don’t want to settle down and live in a house yet or anything. I just want to keep riding this rainbow.”

When we finally arrive at the Skytree, there is, as promised, a huge press scrum, and seemingly hundreds of Japanese officials all dressed exactly alike, who follow us as we traipse around the upper floors searching for a view in vain; we can see nothing but a thick, gray soup. But fortunately Lady Gaga is here, ready to be photographed. She steps up to a microphone and says a few words about “this beautiful country.” When she finishes, we head to another floor, where she is presented with some sort of plaque and a big bag of gifts. She reaches into the bag and pulls out a little plush toy: it is Sorakara-chan, the Skytree mascot, a cute little cartoony character whose hair is shaped like a star. “It’s you,” I say. “She has a star for a head.” “I know!” she says, and walks away laughing.

“Just the other day,” Lady Gaga tells me later, “someone asked a very good friend of mine what I’m like. And I said, ‘Well, what did you say?’ And he said, ‘I want you to imagine every creative idea you’ve ever had in your brain. Then I would like you to imagine that those ideas never stop—they come all the time. And then I would like you to imagine that you create every single one of them. That’s how I would describe her. It’s like there’s no little star that doesn’t get through her galaxy. She catches every single one and puts it in the sky, and she makes it the most important star that ever existed.’ ”